On Wed, 8 Dec 1999 14:31:45 -0000 "George Pennefather"
<poseidon at eircom.net> writes:
>>>Louis: Gary just got his PhD. I wish him well on behalf of the list.
>If all
>Marxist professors could set the kind of example that Patrick Bond,
>Carrol
>Cox, Michael Hoover, Michael Perelman, Jim Blaut and Yoshie Furuhashi
>have
>set, the world would be a better place. Apologies in advance to
>anybody's
>name I've left off..
>>George: What bourgeois sentimentality!
What a bad mood we are in today, George. Do I detect a whiff of
sour grapes?
> Louis considers the acquisition
>of bourgeois
>academic degrees an achievement.
I don't think that Louis puts that great a stock
in academic degrees as such but he does think it
important that people who are avowed Marxists
be able to take teaching posts at bourgeois
academic institutions where the next generation
of intellectuals and professionals are being trained.
It is precisely in such institutions that many of the
past great leaders of the workers movement were
radicalized in the first place, starting with Marx.
Lenin began his political career as a student activist
as have many other important Marxist leaders including
Trotskyists.
> Bourgeois degrees are now a hallmark
>of the successful
>revolutionary. Surely the bourgeois academic establishment is not the
>source for
>determining one's understanding of the character of the class struggle
>in its different
>forms.
No one here as ever made such a claim. If anything Proyect
has often been considered to be overly anti-academic in the
past.
>>Surely the degree to which one is theoretically developed and correct
>is not to be
>determined by a bourgeois institution. Surely revolutionaries know
>what the conferral of
>degrees is all about.
I take it then that you think that Marx wasted his time getting
that doctorate in philosophy or that Lenin wasted his time
pursuing a law degree. It is important that Marxists achieve
some representation within the academic world and within
the professions precisely because these institituions are
important props for bourgeois rule. The defection of the
intellectual and professional strata is something that I
would think that Marxists would find to be an important
to be worker for since it would constitute a major blow
to bourgeois hegemony. The kind of extreme 'workerism'
tinged with a bit of anti-intellectualism seems to me to be
quite self-defeating.
>>Louis is so bourgeois.
Anyway, I would say congratulations to Gary on his doctorate.
Jim Farmelant
>>Warm regards
>George Pennefather
>>Be free to check out our Communist Think-Tank web site at
>http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/>
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